OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
MONOPOLY: Learning to Price Public Facilities for Revaluing Private Properties with Large-Scale Urban Data
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2024
Year: 2024

The value assessment of private properties is an attractive but challenging task which is widely concerned by a majority of people around the world. A prolonged topic among us is ``\textit{how much is my house worth?}''. To answer this question, most experienced agencies would like to price a property given the factors of its attributes as well as the demographics and the public facilities around it. However, no one knows the exact prices of these factors, especially the values of public facilities which may help assess private properties. In this paper, we introduce our newly launched project ``Monopoly'' (named after a classic board game) in which we propose a distributed approach for revaluing private properties by learning to price public facilities (such as hospitals etc.) with the large-scale urban data we have accumulated via Baidu Maps. To be specific, our method organizes many points of interest (POIs) into an undirected weighted graph and formulates multiple factors including the virtual prices of surrounding public facilities as adaptive variables to parallelly estimate the housing prices we know. Then the prices of both public facilities and private properties can be iteratively updated according to the loss of prediction until convergence. We have conducted extensive experiments with the large-scale urban data of several metropolises in China. Results show that our approach outperforms several mainstream methods with significant margins. Further insights from more in-depth discussions demonstrate that the ``Monopoly'' is an innovative application in the interdisciplinary field of business intelligence and urban computing, and it will be beneficial to tens of millions of our users for investments and to the governments for urban planning as well as taxation.
Fine-Tuning Small Embeddings for Elevated Performance
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

Contextual Embeddings have yielded state-of-the-art results in various natural language processing tasks. However, these embeddings are constrained by models requiring large amounts of data and huge computing power. This is an issue for low-resource languages like Nepali as the amount of data available over the internet is not always sufficient for the models. This work has taken an incomplete BERT model with six attention heads pretrained on Nepali language and finetuned it on previously unseen data. The obtained results from intrinsic and extrinsic evaluations have been compared to the results drawn from the original model baseline and a complete BERT model pretrained on Nepali language as the oracle. The results demonstrate that even though the oracle is better on average, finetuning the small embeddings drastically improves results compared to the original baseline.
Edge-Assisted Accelerated Cooperative Sensing for CAVs: Task Placement and Resource Allocation
Venue: arXiv cs.NI 2024
Year: 2024

In this paper, we propose a novel road side unit (RSU)-assisted cooperative sensing scheme for connected autonomous vehicles (CAVs), with the objective to reduce completion time of sensing tasks. Specifically, LiDAR sensing data of both RSU and CAVs are selectively fused to improve sensing accuracy, and computing resources therein are cooperatively utilized to process tasks in real time. To this end, for each task, we decide whether to compute it at the CAV or at the RSU and allocate resources accordingly. We first formulate a joint task placement and resource allocation problem for minimizing the total task completion time while satisfying sensing accuracy constraint. We then decouple the problem into two subproblems and propose a two-layer algorithm to solve them. The outer layer first makes task placement decision based on the Gibbs sampling theory, while the inner layer makes spectrum and computing resource allocation decisions via greedy-based and convex optimization subroutines, respectively. Simulation results based on the autonomous driving simulator CARLA demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed scheme in reducing total task completion time, comparing to benchmark schemes.
Harnessing Large Language Models for Seed Generation in Greybox Fuzzing
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2024
Year: 2024

Greybox fuzzing has emerged as a preferred technique for discovering software bugs, striking a balance between efficiency and depth of exploration. While research has focused on improving fuzzing techniques, the importance of high-quality initial seeds remains critical yet often overlooked. Existing methods for seed generation are limited, especially for programs with non-standard or custom input formats. Large Language Models (LLMs) has revolutionized numerous domains, showcasing unprecedented capabilities in understanding and generating complex patterns across various fields of knowledge. This paper introduces SeedMind, a novel system that leverages LLMs to boost greybox fuzzing through intelligent seed generation. Unlike previous approaches, SeedMind employs LLMs to create test case generators rather than directly producing test cases. Our approach implements an iterative, feedback-driven process that guides the LLM to progressively refine test case generation, aiming for increased code coverage depth and breadth. In developing SeedMind, we addressed key challenges including input format limitations, context window constraints, and ensuring consistent, progress-aware behavior. Intensive evaluations with real-world applications show that SeedMind effectively harnesses LLMs to generate high-quality test cases and facilitate fuzzing in bug finding, presenting utility comparable to human-created seeds and significantly outperforming the existing LLM-based solutions.
A Cost-Effective Approach to Smooth A* Path Planning for Autonomous Vehicles
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2024
Year: 2024

Path planning for wheeled mobile robots is a critical component in the field of automation and intelligent transportation systems. Car-like vehicles, which have non-holonomic constraints on their movement capability impose additional requirements on the planned paths. Traditional path planning algorithms, such as A* , are widely used due to their simplicity and effectiveness in finding optimal paths in complex environments. However, these algorithms often do not consider vehicle dynamics, resulting in paths that are infeasible or impractical for actual driving. Specifically, a path that minimizes the number of grid cells may still be too curvy or sharp for a car-like vehicle to navigate smoothly. This paper addresses the need for a path planning solution that not only finds a feasible path but also ensures that the path is smooth and drivable. By adapting the A* algorithm for a curvature constraint and incorporating a cost function that considers the smoothness of possible paths, we aim to bridge the gap between grid based path planning and smooth paths that are drivable by car-like vehicles. The proposed method leverages motion primitives, pre-computed using a ribbon based path planner that produces smooth paths of minimum curvature. The motion primitives guide the A* algorithm in finding paths of minimal length and curvature. With the proposed modification on the A* algorithm, the planned paths can be constraint to have a minimum turning radius much larger than the grid size. We demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm in different unstructured environments. In a two-stage planning approach, first the modified A* algorithm finds a grid-based path and the ribbon based path planner creates a smooth path within the area of grid cells. The resulting paths are smooth with small curvatures independent of the orientation of the grid axes and even in presence of sharp obstacles.
Abductive Symbolic Solver on Abstraction and Reasoning Corpus
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2024
Year: 2024

This paper addresses the challenge of enhancing artificial intelligence reasoning capabilities, focusing on logicality within the Abstraction and Reasoning Corpus (ARC). Humans solve such visual reasoning tasks based on their observations and hypotheses, and they can explain their solutions with a proper reason. However, many previous approaches focused only on the grid transition and it is not enough for AI to provide reasonable and human-like solutions. By considering the human process of solving visual reasoning tasks, we have concluded that the thinking process is likely the abductive reasoning process. Thus, we propose a novel framework that symbolically represents the observed data into a knowledge graph and extracts core knowledge that can be used for solution generation. This information limits the solution search space and helps provide a reasonable mid-process. Our approach holds promise for improving AI performance on ARC tasks by effectively narrowing the solution space and providing logical solutions grounded in core knowledge extraction.
"What you think is private is no longer" -- Investigating the Aftermath of Shoulder Surfing on Smartphones in Everyday Life through the Eyes of the Victims
Venue: arXiv cs.HC 2024
Year: 2024

Shoulder surfing has been studied extensively, however, it remains unexplored whether and how it impacts users. Understanding this is important as it determines whether shoulder surfing poses a significant concern and, if so, how best to address it. By surveying smartphone users in the UK, we explore how shoulder surfing impacts a) the privacy perceptions of victim users and b) their interaction with smartphones. We found that the impact of being shoulder surfed is highly individual. It is perceived as unavoidable and frequently occurring, leading to increased time for task completion. Individuals are concerned for their own and other peoples privacy, seeing shoulder surfing as a gateway to more serious threats like identity or device theft. Participants expressed a willingness to alter their behaviour and use software based protective measures to prevent shoulder surfing, yet, this comes with a set of user defined criteria, such as effectiveness, affordability, reliability, and availability. We discuss future work directions for user-centred shoulder surfing mitigation.
Hidden Data Privacy Breaches in Federated Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

Federated Learning (FL) emerged as a paradigm for conducting machine learning across broad and decentralized datasets, promising enhanced privacy by obviating the need for direct data sharing. However, recent studies show that attackers can steal private data through model manipulation or gradient analysis. Existing attacks are constrained by low theft quantity or low-resolution data, and they are often detected through anomaly monitoring in gradients or weights. In this paper, we propose a novel data-reconstruction attack leveraging malicious code injection, supported by two key techniques, i.e., distinctive and sparse encoding design and block partitioning. Unlike conventional methods that require detectable changes to the model, our method stealthily embeds a hidden model using parameter sharing to systematically extract sensitive data. The Fibonacci-based index design ensures efficient, structured retrieval of memorized data, while the block partitioning method enhances our method's capability to handle high-resolution images by dividing them into smaller, manageable units. Extensive experiments on 4 datasets confirmed that our method is superior to the five state-of-the-art data-reconstruction attacks under the five respective detection methods. Our method can handle large-scale and high-resolution data without being detected or mitigated by state-of-the-art data reconstruction defense methods. In contrast to baselines, our method can be directly applied to both FedAVG and FedSGD scenarios, underscoring the need for developers to devise new defenses against such vulnerabilities. We will open-source our code upon acceptance.
Optimizing Multispectral Object Detection: A Bag of Tricks and Comprehensive Benchmarks
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Multispectral object detection, utilizing RGB and TIR (thermal infrared) modalities, is widely recognized as a challenging task. It requires not only the effective extraction of features from both modalities and robust fusion strategies, but also the ability to address issues such as spectral discrepancies, spatial misalignment, and environmental dependencies between RGB and TIR images. These challenges significantly hinder the generalization of multispectral detection systems across diverse scenarios. Although numerous studies have attempted to overcome these limitations, it remains difficult to clearly distinguish the performance gains of multispectral detection systems from the impact of these "optimization techniques". Worse still, despite the rapid emergence of high-performing single-modality detection models, there is still a lack of specialized training techniques that can effectively adapt these models for multispectral detection tasks. The absence of a standardized benchmark with fair and consistent experimental setups also poses a significant barrier to evaluating the effectiveness of new approaches. To this end, we propose the first fair and reproducible benchmark specifically designed to evaluate the training "techniques", which systematically classifies existing multispectral object detection methods, investigates their sensitivity to hyper-parameters, and standardizes the core configurations. A comprehensive evaluation is conducted across multiple representative multispectral object detection datasets, utilizing various backbone networks and detection frameworks. Additionally, we introduce an efficient and easily deployable multispectral object detection framework that can seamlessly optimize high-performing single-modality models into dual-modality models, integrating our advanced training techniques.
CXL-Interference: Analysis and Characterization in Modern Computer Systems
Venue: arXiv cs.AR 2024
Year: 2024

Compute Express Link (CXL) is a promising technology that addresses memory and storage challenges. Despite its advantages, CXL faces performance threats from external interference when co-existing with current memory and storage systems. This interference is under-explored in existing research. To address this, we develop CXL-Interplay, systematically characterizing and analyzing interference from memory and storage systems. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to characterize CXL interference on real CXL hardware. We also provide reverse-reasoning analysis with performance counters and kernel functions. In the end, we propose and evaluate mitigating solutions.
Undirected 3-Fault Replacement Path in Nearly Cubic Time
Venue: arXiv cs.DS 2024
Year: 2024

Given a graph $G=(V,E)$ and two vertices $s,t\in V$, the $f$-fault replacement path ($f$FRP) problem computes for every set of edges $F$ where $|F|\leq f$, the distance from $s$ to $t$ when edges in $F$ fail. A recent result shows that 2FRP in directed graphs can be solved in $\tilde{O}(n^3)$ time [arXiv:2209.07016]. In this paper, we show a 3FRP algorithm in deterministic $\tilde{O}(n^3)$ time for undirected weighted graphs, which almost matches the size of the output. This implies that $f$FRP in undirected graphs can be solved in almost optimal $\tilde{O}(n^f)$ time for all $f\geq 3$. To construct our 3FRP algorithm, we introduce an incremental distance sensitivity oracle (DSO) with $\tilde{O}(n^2)$ worst-case update time, while preprocessing time, space, and query time are still $\tilde{O}(n^3)$, $\tilde{O}(n^2)$ and $\tilde{O}(1)$, respectively, which match the static DSO [Bernstein and Karger 2009]. Here in a DSO, we can preprocess a graph so that the distance between any pair of vertices given any failed edge can be answered efficiently. From the recent result in [arXiv:2211.05178], we can obtain an offline dynamic DSO from the incremental worst-case DSO, which makes the construction of our 3FRP algorithm more convenient. By the offline dynamic DSO, we can also construct a 2-fault single-source replacement path (2-fault SSRP) algorithm in $\tilde{O}(n^3)$ time, that is, from a given vertex $s$, we want to find the distance to any vertex $t$ when any pair of edges fail. Thus the $\tilde{O}(n^3)$ time complexity for 2-fault SSRP is also almost optimal. Now we know that in undirected graphs 1FRP can be solved in $\tilde{O}(m)$ time [Nardelli, Proietti, Widmayer 2001], and 2FRP and 3FRP in undirected graphs can be solved in $\tilde{O}(n^3)$ time. In this paper, we also show that a truly subcubic algorithm for 2FRP in undirected graphs does not exist under APSP-hardness conjecture.
RITA: Automatic Framework for Designing of Resilient IoT Applications
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2024
Year: 2024

Designing resilient Internet of Things (IoT) systems requires i) identification of IoT Critical Objects (ICOs) such as services, devices, and resources, ii) threat analysis, and iii) mitigation strategy selection. However, the traditional process for designing resilient IoT systems is still manual, leading to inefficiencies and increased risks. In addition, while tools such as ChatGPT could support this manual and highly error-prone process, their use raises concerns over data privacy, inconsistent outputs, and internet dependence. Therefore, we propose RITA, an automated, open-source framework that uses a fine-tuned RoBERTa-based Named Entity Recognition (NER) model to identify ICOs from IoT requirement documents, correlate threats, and recommend countermeasures. RITA operates entirely offline and can be deployed on-site, safeguarding sensitive information and delivering consistent outputs that enhance standardization. In our empirical evaluation, RITA outperformed ChatGPT in four of seven ICO categories, particularly in actuator, sensor, network resource, and service identification, using both human-annotated and ChatGPT-generated test data. These findings indicate that RITA can improve resilient IoT design by effectively supporting key security operations, offering a practical solution for developing robust IoT architectures.
XR-MBT: Multi-modal Full Body Tracking for XR through Self-Supervision with Learned Depth Point Cloud Registration
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Tracking the full body motions of users in XR (AR/VR) devices is a fundamental challenge to bring a sense of authentic social presence. Due to the absence of dedicated leg sensors, currently available body tracking methods adopt a synthesis approach to generate plausible motions given a 3-point signal from the head and controller tracking. In order to enable mixed reality features, modern XR devices are capable of estimating depth information of the headset surroundings using available sensors combined with dedicated machine learning models. Such egocentric depth sensing cannot drive the body directly, as it is not registered and is incomplete due to limited field-of-view and body self-occlusions. For the first time, we propose to leverage the available depth sensing signal combined with self-supervision to learn a multi-modal pose estimation model capable of tracking full body motions in real time on XR devices. We demonstrate how current 3-point motion synthesis models can be extended to point cloud modalities using a semantic point cloud encoder network combined with a residual network for multi-modal pose estimation. These modules are trained jointly in a self-supervised way, leveraging a combination of real unregistered point clouds and simulated data obtained from motion capture. We compare our approach against several state-of-the-art systems for XR body tracking and show that our method accurately tracks a diverse range of body motions. XR-MBT tracks legs in XR for the first time, whereas traditional synthesis approaches based on partial body tracking are blind.
Efficient and Diverse Generative Robot Designs using Evolution and Intrinsic Motivation
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2024
Year: 2024

Methods for generative design of robot physical configurations can automatically find optimal and innovative solutions for challenging tasks in complex environments. The vast search-space includes the physical design-space and the controller parameter-space, making it a challenging problem in machine learning and optimisation in general. Evolutionary algorithms (EAs) have shown promising results in generating robot designs via gradient-free optimisation. Morpho-evolution with learning (MEL) uses EAs to concurrently generate robot designs and learn the optimal parameters of the controllers. Two main issues prevent MEL from scaling to higher complexity tasks: computational cost and premature convergence to sub-optimal designs. To address these issues, we propose combining morpho-evolution with intrinsic motivations. Intrinsically motivated behaviour arises from embodiment and simple learning rules without external guidance. We use a homeokinetic controller that generates exploratory behaviour in a few seconds with reduced knowledge of the robot's design. Homeokinesis replaces costly learning phases, reducing computational time and favouring diversity, preventing premature convergence. We compare our approach with current MEL methods in several downstream tasks. The generated designs score higher in all the tasks, are more diverse, and are quickly generated compared to morpho-evolution with static parameters.
Is my Meeting Summary Good? Estimating Quality with a Multi-LLM Evaluator
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

The quality of meeting summaries generated by natural language generation (NLG) systems is hard to measure automatically. Established metrics such as ROUGE and BERTScore have a relatively low correlation with human judgments and fail to capture nuanced errors. Recent studies suggest using large language models (LLMs), which have the benefit of better context understanding and adaption of error definitions without training on a large number of human preference judgments. However, current LLM-based evaluators risk masking errors and can only serve as a weak proxy, leaving human evaluation the gold standard despite being costly and hard to compare across studies. In this work, we present MESA, an LLM-based framework employing a three-step assessment of individual error types, multi-agent discussion for decision refinement, and feedback-based self-training to refine error definition understanding and alignment with human judgment. We show that MESA's components enable thorough error detection, consistent rating, and adaptability to custom error guidelines. Using GPT-4o as its backbone, MESA achieves mid to high Point-Biserial correlation with human judgment in error detection and mid Spearman and Kendall correlation in reflecting error impact on summary quality, on average 0.25 higher than previous methods. The framework's flexibility in adapting to custom error guidelines makes it suitable for various tasks with limited human-labeled data.